


Devil's Backbone

by Sidara



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-24
Updated: 2014-05-24
Packaged: 2018-01-26 08:46:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1682177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sidara/pseuds/Sidara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve remembers what it felt like when he drowned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Devil's Backbone

**Author's Note:**

> Kind of played around with language here. Went for a more atmospheric tone than usual.
> 
> This is all nightwalker's fault.

Steve remembers what it felt like when he drowned. The way the water tasted, icy cold and salt-rich. He wakes most nights trying to remember how to breathe, how to forget the instinctual fight the human body puts forth to survive.

He wakes, and he runs.

***

The body count starts at a paltry dozen before rising. First one not-so-secret Hydra base, then another, all of them left destroyed, the people manning them killed. Some fronted as medical research facilities, others as well-respected businesses in their communities. Then outliers begin to show up. A person here, a group there, citizens with seemingly no military or shady corporate ties to anyone, but attachments nonetheless to an assassin who has slipped his leash.

With S.H.I.E.L.D.’s secrets dumped on the Internet for all the world to see and use and dissect, there are few secrets left to unearth. The Winter Soldier’s identity is one of them. Still an unknown, still a ghost, with a kill list that made history bullet by knife by bullet, his origins are incomplete in the data dump Natasha performed. Back before the Internet became not just a way of life, but a necessity, information was recorded in hard copy. Paper files are becoming a thing of the past, but that does not mean they are unused or forgotten.

Steve carries the file Natasha cashed in favors for everywhere he goes. None of the information between its sleeves exists online; he knows, he asked JARVIS to look for him. The whole of it is found nowhere in the data in either Russian or translated English.

Classified: EYES ONLY

Project: WINTER SOLDIER

Subject: BARNES, JAMES BUCHANAN, (SGT)

Bits and pieces of a torturous beginning that Steve reads and re-reads, because he knows he cannot flinch from a result he blames himself for causing.

_I should have looked for you_ , he thinks.

He is looking now, years too late.

***

“Finding him won’t be easy,” Sam says on yet another flight to a country Steve remembers differently from before. No front lines, no occupied air space, no official war zone. Just tourist cities and the occasional civil unrest that stops at the borders. Today’s society considers it rude to invade your neighbor.

“I know,” Steve replies, staring out the plane window and seeing only clouds. “But I owe it to him to try. He saved me when he could have let me sink to the bottom of the Potomac.”

“That doesn’t mean he remembers.”

They have chased leads that end in the slow slaughter of Hydra agents, deep undercover agents, ones whose identities are barely mentioned in the data dump but are written out in the file tucked away in Steve’s carry-on. People who used and made and tortured his best friend over long decades. There are ties being cut here and only one person is doing the cutting.

“I think he remembers enough,” Steve says softly.

Sam doesn’t argue; knows well the stubborn streak that runs through Steve, despite their short acquaintance. He merely stretches out his legs and closes his eyes, slipping into sleep with an ease of long practice. Like any good soldier of any military branch, Sam, like Steve, knows to catch sleep when he can, wherever it’s safe. Enemy territory is not kind to the sleep-deprived, and anywhere the Winter Soldier goes can be considered ground zero of a one man war.

They do not hide their approach. Strictly speaking, they cannot. Steve carries the mantle of Captain America at parade rest and the shield sets off all manner of metal detectors. Sam’s wings make it through Customs only by judicious use of borrowed cloaking technology embedded in a carry case made to look harmless, courtesy of Tony Stark and minor hacking by way of JARVIS. Steve and Sam are each what weapons they carry—as crutches, as symbols—and make no apologies for it to anyone who tries to stop them.

They take planes and trains alike, driving when needed, crisscrossing Europe to cities that Steve remembers as occupied a lifetime ago. Some hold no political or militaristic value any longer; others are world capitals. Still others are little more than hidden bunkers at the end of half-forgotten roads Google Maps has no record of.

These are always the bloodiest.

Steve inspects the remnants of a chair that barely matches the schematics of the one filed away in hard copy. Remaking men into mindless killers is big business on the black market. The science behind it is worth its weight in gold and small countries. Technological evolutions over the years enabled Hydra to expand their mindwipe program into something unforgivably terrifying. The sleeker, newer, more refined versions of torture are available on the free market now, buried in data. But the prototype, their holy grail, that is only found in hard copy. That horror Steve traces with his fingertips when he cannot sleep.

Steve doesn’t like to think about how this all started, but he can’t forget. He sees it in his nightmares and his waking dreams. A train and a fall and an endless winter behind ice.

He knows how not to scream himself awake in the field. It is a skill he wishes he did not have.

“Steve, come look at this,” Sam says, voice oddly tight.

Steve shakes himself free of his thoughts and goes to join Sam by a terminal that was not wholly destroyed. The screen is black, a single command window open and waiting. The ID field is not a name or a number, but a warning.

STOP FOLLOWING ME

“You gonna do what the crazy guy wants?” Sam asks.

And Steve, well, he never listened back then. He has no plans to now. He thinks—hopes—Bucky will understand.

“No.”

“How’d I guess you were gonna say that?” Sam shakes his head and holds up a flash drive. “Think he might have left some files intact again. I don’t know what that says about his state of mind. He fried the system and blew up the server rooms in the first couple of places he hit.”

“It might not mean anything.”

“Right. Because a world-class assassin going unhinged is something we should ignore.”

“I didn’t ask you to come, Sam.”

“And I told you I’m not leaving. But Steve, he knows we’re after him. He’s not taking out his targets as cleanly as he did in the beginning. He’s not in a right state of mind.”

“Did you really think he would be after everything he’s gone through?”

“No.” And Sam’s voice is gentle, the look on his face concerned. “But I think you do.”

Steve clenches his jaw and takes in a deep, steadying breath. “I know he’s not the same.”

It feels more like a confession than a statement, words that choke him like water once had. Sam knows the process of recovery better than Steve ever will. That doesn’t mean he can stop, turn back, leave it be.

Growing up together through the Great Depression, Bucky always shared. Food, money, women, his generosity extended to his immediate family, Steve’s mother, and Steve, but it was there. It existed. Bucky shared, and Steve shared Bucky with everyone, when all he ever wanted was the other man for himself.

Selfishness is a sin preached as unholy. Steve gave up on being a good Catholic boy in favor of following in Bucky’s wake years ago. This, now, is no different.

He thinks God will forgive him in the end.

He doesn’t know what Bucky will do.

***

Steve gets shot in Prague. He doesn’t see the bullet that hits him in the shoulder. No one ever does when it is the Winter Soldier pulling the trigger. But Steve feels it, brachial artery nicked, blood flowing too hot and too fast down his arm. Steve presses a hand to the wound even as Sam hauls him out of the line of fire, looking for cover.

They’d happened upon a Hydra base with one person still breathing inside. Steve closes his eyes, the image of Bucky’s blood spattered face before he turned and ran burned into his mind. He and Sam gave chase, because that is all Steve has been doing since leaving America. They never caught up to Bucky and this is the result of too little, too late. A hole in Steve’s body, in his heart.

“He didn’t mean it,” Steve says.

Sam gives him an incredulous look. “You’re bleeding all over me. How is that him not meaning it?”

“He missed.”

“Bullet in your body. Bleeding like a stuck pig. There is no _missing_ involved right now, Steve.”

And Steve, he can only smile, despite the pain. “I’m still breathing.”

“Oh my god. Natasha was right. Your star spangled ass is certifiable.”

Sam still gets them out of there before the authorities arrive, going to ground at a safe house that is less S.H.I.E.L.D.’s lost property and more a personal bolt hole with far too many _matryoshkas_ for Steve’s taste. He tips over the smallest one on the nearby shelf while Sam digs the bullet out of his shoulder, needing to cut through partially healed over flesh in order to do so. The knife burns; from the lighter, from the alcohol, from misfiring nerves, Steve cannot tell.

Sam pulls out a bullet that is similar to the round which came out of Fury weeks and weeks ago. No identifying marks and Soviet made. But this bullet didn’t find its target, didn’t leave Steve dead in the street and that—he thinks it means something.

He needs to believe it does.

Steve sleeps with a fifth of whiskey warming his belly and wakes to a familiar face he does not see in his dreams. Natasha’s hair is dyed black, curled and precisely coiffed. She wears a dress that fits her like a glove and heels that Steve has learned from Pepper to be the height of fashion and pain.

“Undercover?” Steve asks, sounding wide awake. It’s an Army thing, he told Tony once, being able to come instantly awake. Tony prefers days of insomnia followed by a coma-like sleep. Steve has slept enough over the years.

Natasha flicks the end of one dark curl with her fingertips. “What gave it away?”

Steve sits up, absently peeling off the pressure bandage Sam had applied before pouring booze down his throat. Not like either were needed. Alcohol does not get him drunk and the wound beneath is gone, healed over completely, with not even an ache to show for it. The serum worked, almost too well, he sometimes thinks. Steve does not feel pain like normal people do. It makes living in this body dangerous, because he still feels too new in his skin sometimes to know where the edge of _too much_ is.

“Still chasing ghosts?” Natasha asks.

“I told you what my plan was.”

“Yes. Chase him down and corner him like a dog.”

Steve glares at her but isn’t so angry that he declines the mug of coffee she hands him. “That’s not what I’m doing. That isn’t what this is about.”

“Isn’t it? I know a thing or two about being cornered, Steve.”

“I’m not leaving him behind.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to. I know what your friends mean to you.”

He looks at her and doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know how to explain that this, whatever it is he and Bucky are doing, is not solely about friendship. Steve would fight to save any of his teammates, any of the few friends he has learned to make in this new world, but Bucky—Bucky is the one he will give up everything for without needing to be asked.

“Oh. It’s like that, is it?” Natasha says softly, not looking away from Steve’s face. “You don’t have a problem with kissing, just kissing people like me.”

She says the words like a balm, soothing and quiet. No judgment, not that he expected such from her. Natasha is many things but she is not inherently cruel. She learned kindness through trial and error. Steve likes when she practices on him, when she curls her hand over his and squeezes, hard. Gentle has its place, but not between them in a situation like this.

“Drink your coffee,” Natasha says. “Sam is making breakfast. We’ll talk after.”

“We’ll talk now.”

“Coffee. Shower. Food.”

Steve knows a losing fight when he is in the middle of one. He follows Natasha’s orders like the good soldier he is and gets rewarded with news.

“James has hit Interpol’s grid the last two times he’s crossed a country’s borders. Either he is getting careless or he doesn’t care. Neither option is good,” Natasha says.

“Is Interpol tracking him?” Sam asks.

“They’ve tried. They come up empty every time after the initial border breach.”

“That’s good, right?” Steve says.

Natasha gives him an almost pitying look. “Interpol is not the only one who wants him.”

She has a list, and it is long. Dozens of intelligence groups out of countries on nearly every continent and twice that number in criminal groups. Every name comes with a larger operating network at their disposal than a singular man with only the company he keeps around a table to back him up.

“Stark analyzed the locations James has hit against the data dump and what’s in your file. He thinks James is looking for his maker.”

There is a long-faded stamp on a page in the hard copy, the signature scrawled over it approving the experiment just as faded, but no less sinister for the legacy it engendered. Steve does not easily kill, but he thinks he could murder Aleksander Lukin with both eyes open and sleep better for it.

“Hydra has gone to ground,” Sam points out. “Ever since you name dropped everyone in their super secret madmen only club by way of social media, they’ve cut ties and run. New identities, new agendas, new everything, it sounds like.”

“New puppets. Same regime.” Natasha shrugs. “It’s expected. Their kind never learns.”

“Finding those responsible has only gotten harder. James has been targeting places he seems to remember. But he won’t know where to look beyond those locations if the agents who used to be in charge of him leave and don’t expect him to return.”

“Then maybe Bucky isn’t looking for them,” Steve says. “Maybe he’s looking for himself.”

“You really believe that?”

Steve touches his shoulder, mouth firming in a stubborn line. “He missed. He doesn’t miss.”

If Steve had to follow Bucky through his best friend’s own personal hell, then he would. It was the very least Steve owed for not reaching him in time when it mattered most.

“I can’t stay,” Natasha tells them after a brief, heavy silence. “Fury needs me in Poland. My flight leaves at noon.”

“Thank you for this,” Steve tells her.

He walks Natasha to the door while Sam cleans up the kitchen. Natasha pauses on the porch, heels sinking into the worn welcome mat, looking at Steve with a steadiness he stopped finding unnerving back in New York City, when aliens rained down from the sky.

“When it was me,” she tells him, the words coming out quiet and strong. “I needed to lose myself first. I had to unmake me in order to find me. Do you understand?”

Steve nods, slow and exact, and tries not to let her words hurt. “I understand.”

Natasha leans up to press a soft kiss to his cheek. She leaves color behind that Steve rubs away with fingers that do not shake.

***

Steve wakes one night in Paris, light from the Eiffel Tower spinning through his small hotel room in timed sweeps. He wakes not from a nightmare, but from a weight on his chest and hands on his throat. Fingers press against the kill spots there on his neck, the touch warm and cold alike.

In shadow, Bucky is infinitely dangerous. But Steve can breathe, can speak. He knows he can move if he wants to, and that freedom tells him more than words ever will about Bucky’s state of mind.

“You need to stop,” Bucky rasps.

“I can’t do that, Buck,” Steve says, quiet and firm.

Light sweeps through the room again, ghosting across Bucky’s face for a split second. Steve can just make out the confusion in his eyes, the snarl twisting his mouth, but the hands on Steve’s throat do not move. Slowly, telegraphing every motion, Steve lifts his right hand to touch Bucky’s left shoulder, the metal cool against his skin. Bucky does not react, not until Steve’s fingers find the seam of scars that bind machine to flesh. Muscles twitch, just the tiniest of protests, and Steve freezes.

Bucky grabs his hands, jerks it away. “Don’t.”

“I know what they did to you.”

“You know nothing.”

He is right. Steve does not know how long each torture session lasted, nor how much it must have hurt the other man. A file is nothing but diagrams and words, it is not experience. This is not something they shared, and Steve hates that.

Steve tangles his fingers in the chain around his neck, yanking it free with a small tug. The dog tags are old, with flecks of rust embedded in metal not even the best Smithsonian conservator could scrape away. Steve presses the dog tags into Bucky’s hand, folding metal fingers over them.

Steve swallows, mouth dry, tongue unable to form anything but a single word. “Stay.”

He doesn’t.

In the morning, Sam says, “Natasha sent an update. I think we got a lead.”

Steve nods and does not admit to what kept him up last night.

***

It ends in Rome, on the rooftops of a city Steve has only sketchy memories of. The rain is ceaseless, the only constant in a directionless chase high above streets that could be laid down in any of the countries Steve has traveled through these past weeks.

There is no one around to see Steve throw his shield, for Bucky to catch it like he did in Washington, D.C., on the front lines of 1942, eyes and face the same back then as they are now.

But Steve does not hesitate this time. Does not pause indecisively before a ghost of a memory. He takes them both over the edge, feeling gravity tug with an inexorable pull. In the few seconds it takes to fall, Steve angles the shield to take the impact for them. Landing shakes his bones, drives the air out of his lungs, teeth catching the edge of his tongue. The taste of copper floods his mouth; Bucky’s face fills his eyes.

In the stinking wet of an alleyway, in a city that survived a war they both lost in their own way, Steve holds onto his past with a desperation that chokes him.

“ _I’m not him_ ,” Bucky snarls in his face, hands and body pinning Steve to the ground. “Why can’t you understand that?”

“You are him,” Steve promises. He doesn’t know who he is trying to convince, himself or the remnants of the man he sees in Bucky’s eyes. “You _are_.”

The metal fist catches him in the jaw, rattling loose several teeth. Steve spits blood and shifts his weight in an instant, rolling them. Bucky twists out of his grip, scrambling to his feet with a lack of grace the Winter Soldier is not known for but which is pure Brooklyn grit.

This time Steve is ready for the punch, ready for the hits and the heartache. This is not like the end of Project Insight. This is not a man following mission protocols written over his brain. This is ugly and desperate and _painful_. This is everything they are not supposed to be, but what they could have been is lost to history and irretrievable.

“Don’t,” Steve pleads, slamming Bucky against the dirty wall, knocking aside a knife pulled form a hidden sheath. His shield is on the ground, Bucky’s metal fingers are twisted in his hair, and all Steve thinks, all he can say is “I know you.”

He said different words before, once upon a time. When they were younger, he was smaller, and the draft letter sat between them like something poisonous. Bucky went where Steve could not follow until someone else took pity on him. Dr. Erskine chose Steve because he is good in all the ways that matter. What history never got wrong, because it never got written down, is that Steve is only good for Bucky.

And maybe some last shred of who Bucky is—friend, partner, lover—still exists inside the cracked false memories Hydra made for him. It is the only reason Steve has for the kiss. For the way Bucky bites his way inside Steve’s mouth, fighting for a control and autonomy he’d had taken away from him over and over again through the years while Steve was lost to time in the Arctic.

“I know you,” Bucky echoes, ragged and low, sounding so damned lost to Steve’s ears. “I _know_ you. But I don’t know me.”

Steve closes his eyes; thinks of Natasha and her words of wisdom, words of warning. He presses his forehead to Bucky’s and breathes with him, for him. Then Steve does the one thing he told himself he would never do again.

He lets Bucky go.

“Come back to me when you do. I’ll be home,” Steve says, voice cracking on the words. “Waiting.”

Steve isn’t sure who leaves the alley beneath the downpour—Bucky or the Winter Soldier. Steve only hopes the other man finds some kind of peace down whatever road memory takes him.

***

They both know what it feels like to not breathe. To have water displace air, to have ice freeze involuntary functions at the synaptic point.

They know how it feels to drown.

***

It is five months before Steve sees Bucky again. Steve comes back from a marathon run through Brooklyn’s empty streets—literally twenty six miles, still not far enough, long enough, to outrun his ghosts—to the smell of coffee he did not set to brew and the breeze from an open window.

Sam is in D.C.

Natasha is in Europe shadowing Fury.

Bucky sits at the kitchen table, early morning sunlight glinting across his metal arm. The red star has been sanded off, the metal there scratched and dull. He is dressed in civilian clothes; casual, solid colors that would not stand out in a crowd. A jacket is slung over a nearby chair, dirty from travel across who knew how many countries. Steve’s dog tags hang from his neck out in the open like a promise.

He looks tired, the dark circles beneath his eyes testimony of long days and even longer nights. The look in Bucky’s eyes, however, is sharp, the steely-eyed gaze of a sniper who does not miss, either his target, or the rising hope in Steve’s own eyes.

“Hello, punk,” Bucky says in a low voice that is neither him as he was nor the Winter Soldier from before, but some amalgamation of the two.

And Steve—he _breathes_.


End file.
